Only in America: the best experiences

Bob Dylan came to New York's Greenwich Village in 1961. For a period this grid
of streets, barely a couple of square miles in total, generated a buzz of
creative energy that forged Dylan’s artistic sensibility.

Visitors should start at the White Horse Tavern. It's an old longshoremen’s
dive (the Hudson River is just three blocks west) with an impeccable
bohemian pedigree: in the 1950s Dylan Thomas, as well as having his name
filched by a young kid in Minnesota called Robert Zimmerman, drank his last
at the bar before dying a few days later; Norman Mailer supposedly conceived
the radical Village Voice newspaper here; and it was a Beat poet hangout. It
was also where Dylan listened to the Clancy Brothers singing “rousing rebel
songs that would lift the roof”.

Other Dylan sites in New York include Cafe Wha? on Macdougal St, which Dylan
sought out when he arrived in New York. Here, to an audience of “lunch-hour
secretaries, sailors and tourists” he played harmonica for Freddy Neil, who
later wrote Everybody’s Talkin’, popularised in the film Midnight Cowboy;
the former Commons coffeehouse in Minetta St where he wrote Blowin’ in the
Wind; and the Hotel Chelsea, which was the home of numerous musicians,
including Dylan, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, and Leonard Cohen.